How Tire Recycling Improves the Environment

Today, the entire world produces more than a billion tires each year. Most of the tires are normally used to drive less than 50000 miles, thus landfills and stockpiles receive more and more tires. If we want to stop further stockpiling and accumulation of scrap tires at landfills, tire recycling should become an obligatory practice regulated by law everywhere in the world.

It is worth to mention that there is a number of environmental benefits of tire recycling. On average, tires are composed of twenty various chemicals that can be extremely hazardous, as they pollute the environment. There is also a risk of groundwater pollution because of the chemical binder materials that tires are made of. Moreover, aromatic hydrocarbons are dangerous to human health and may lead to cancer and other severe diseases.

When tires are simply stored at landfills instead of being recycled, components such as binder materials can contaminate soil, because they start degrading over time. They become especially dangerous during rain, as the chemicals enter the soil, going further down for some miles to water sources that surround the landfill. If there are wells in the area as close as two miles from the landfill, it is highly likely that the water there will become contaminated, too.

Another risk of non-recycled tires is that improperly stored at landfills, they can become the reason of a dangerous fires that will be extremely challenging to extinguish. Scrap tires contain flammable materials, thus when they are stored at landfills tires can easily start burning if they are touched by insignificant flame or spark. The fumes that burning tires produce are much more dangerous than the ones of wildfires. They can even cause lung cancer.

The situation is not unsolvable, as tires can effectively be recycled in many ways. Tire recycling was pioneered by the trucking industry. Tires for long-haul trucks demand regular replacement, as they can complete more than 200,000 miles annually. The replacement takes time, and to reduce that time, many trucking companies started retreading some of them and recycling others. Today, the industry reuses as much as 80 percent of an old worn tire when it recycles it – it simply glues a new traction layer over the used tire casing. That helps clients not buy a retreaded tire – an equivalent of the new one.

Additionally, it is possible to recycle tires in a way that they will be used by other industries, too. There is a number of various products where shredded tires are used as components; some of the goods include shoes, house insulation, piping, wire insulation, walking trails and many other products.

Today’s world is unimaginable without using tires and therefore we need to propertly dispose of the used ones and recycle them. The need to recycle tires yields an attractive opportunity of launching a commercial tire recycling business and making profits saving the environment.

If you are thinking about launching a tire recycling company, contact us and we will provide business counselling, output and equipment recommendations. Our team will be happy to navigate you on how to choose proper tire recycling equipment and put your company on sustainable footing.